******Writer, Photographer, Painter, Sculptor, Musician******* “It’s the journey and not the destination” said Anthony Bourdain.

My Obituary is in the computer.

Every time my mother has felt ill, she has reminded me that she has written her obituary and it is in the computer.

The woman has had two strokes, two TIA’s, breast cancer, and a total of 24 surgeries or procedures in her 89 1/2 years of life. She has about everything wrong with her heart that can be and the 24th procedure was this month. So, you can well imagine that I have kept that thought in my mind: “My obituary is in the computer.”

We thought she was having a third heart attack for the month and took her into the emergency room in intense pain. Luckily, and I say this with all my heart, she got a good physician (this time) in the ER. Last time she was in (this month) she was in for six hours and had a second chest x-ray after three hours because they just realized it was blurry. This doc knew right away that he was not dealing with a heart attack and ordered an MRI on her abdomen.

They found a larger gall stone had fallen into a duct and was blocking the area between her liver and intestines. Her liver was enlarged. She was in immense pain and in an ambulance some 50 miles to Indiana University Medical Center.

We have spent most of our time since at Indiana Medical Center and found it to be the best, ABSOLUTE BEST, bunch of nurses, student nurses, doctors, interns, cleaning staff, people on earth. The one ‘poor quality’ nurse really stood out after seeing so many who rushed in to help her to the bathroom just because they heard her tell us she was going to need to go soon. She rarely had to push a button.

We were told that she had two options and neither was good. If they did not do surgery she would die and if they did surgery, there was a 70% chance she would die. That night, when I went back to her apartment to pick up some things for her, I turned on the computer and looked for her obituary. I had already grabbed the name of the mortuary.

There was NO OBITUARY. What there was, was a read-only file called obituary. I did not tell mom that this document, that I presumed she had worked on so hard, was blank.

Ten days, a PIC line (which is a line they put in after no one can bear to stick her again since her blood clots in the needles anymore), and a procedure later, she was recovering and I got up the nerve to tell her about the missing file. Her response: